I do a lot with Craigslist (I put ads on for neighbors who do not have the internet). I NEVER enable email responses. If they are not offering you extra money for shipping (even on a $20 item!) they are harvesting your email address for spam.

I once put an ad on looking for a seasonal rental and the scam I got was, rent my fabulous house for a low price PLUS have a part time job "processing" payments for the owner who is out of the country. No thanks.

I did once offer a free, very old printer on Freecycle and was contacted by someone about 1000 miles away who offered to pay me for shipping it to him. He did, I shipped it, it was legit. Still can't believe someone wanted it. Apparently he was using some MS-DOS program and this printer would work with it.

I had someone who needed that OLD printer and laptop for the 3.5" floppy drive - they were going to set it up to copy their 3.5" floppies to CDs and print off what they needed from the old files to the old printer. They just hoped that the old equipment would hang on long enough to finish the job.

Their old legacy software was still working with their old legacy computer system - but it turned out that there was no way to export their old files to their new system (apparently someone finally got the boss to admit that a system older than 15 years needed to be updated because computers had gotten enough faster that they would make MORE money if the computers allowed them to be more productive).

As an aside, I've got a computer that still has a floppy drive (not the one I'm currently typing on.) I've still got a lot of stories I wrote in years past that are on floppies, so I need to get busy and transfer them to memory sticks or some other type of archive device.

I know one guy (I eventually gave him the Cut Direct) who was a pathological liar. His parents were slightly well off, but that was because they had one child and both worked long, grueling hours. However, this guy bent over backwards to convince everyone around him that he was part of the leisure class. He was constantly trying to get freebies everywhere when he wasn't trying to convince people that he was rich. Examples include:

-I joined a gym that we were both looking at and he demanded that I open the door for him when he wanted to sneak in, so he wouldn't have to pay for a membership. (A registered key fob was the only thing that could open the door.)

-When we were out at a bar, he buttered up a professor (complementing his clothes/taste) and convinced the professor to buy him shots of ultra-premium tequila.

-He was constantly saying that he "didn't carry cash, only platinum" and so when we were somewhere and he had "maxed his card for the month" he would get a free meal out of one of his fraternity brothers.

-Between paydays, he would run low on funds and so if I suggested a pricier restaurant (even ones that were normal for us to go to) he would say "Sure, if you pay for it" and then whine about how I shouldn't have suggested it. His rationale was always "But you have plenty of money!"

-Stuffing his pockets with free food whenever it was offered in the hallways at school

Examples of him trying to impress people:

-Telling everyone that his dad had an iPad two months before they came out. Of course, he really shouldn't have told me that his dad was technologically deficient immediately beforehand and only had a Blackberry.

-Buying his fraternity brothers pizzas. Apparently, when he pulled out his credit card and bought 10 $5 pizzas, this was all the proof they needed to see that he was "loaded". Of course for months after he would ask for free drinks/food and bring up "That time I bought you all pizza".

-Griping about things like public transportation and whatever smartphone he had. (He broke smartphones like no one's business and would spend hours and hours hashing the details out with a sales rep until he could convince her/him that he deserved a new free one.

As you can see, he was bizarrely driven by what people thought of him, yet he was extremely cheep and obsessed with conning/mooching his way through college.

-Griping about things like public transportation and whatever smartphone he had. (He broke smartphones like no one's business and would spend hours and hours hashing the details out with a sales rep until he could convince her/him that he deserved a new free one.

As you can see, he was bizarrely driven by what people thought of him, yet he was extremely cheep and obsessed with conning/mooching his way through college.

That sounds like my late, great (to the company at least) CW Useless. He was forever trying to angle freebies, or refuse to pay for something, saying this wasn't done right, or that and so on. He spent more time doing that than actually working so I'm really not surprised he isn't with us anymore.

My friend got a really good one the other day. An email from a 'concerned party', warning her about all of the email scams out there, so if she just sent them her information, they'd make sure she didn't get scammed by those other guys.

We were laughing so hard we almost wet ourselves.

I got one from the secretary of the "Nigerian prince" -- "My boss is really trying to scam you! But I think you're such a nice person, I really want to see you get your money."

Logged

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Common sense is not a gift, but a curse. Because thenyou have to deal with all the people who don't have it. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Or the hotel touts hanging around outside a particular international railway stations who were sooo concerned for us, especially that we needed a nice safe hotel where we wouldn't get ripped off- unlike the hotels being offered by all the other touts. Yeah. Right.

A book was serialised on the radio last year chronicling the emails of someone who pretended to fall for a scam. It was one where you had to send your bank details and he spun the scammer out for ages, asking naive questions. I wish I could remember what it was called, as it was very funny as the scammer got more and more exasperated with him.

Not sure if your book was fact or fiction, but if you like this kind of thing, I highly recommend "Greetings in Jesus Name!: The Scambaiter Letters" by Mike Berry. They are the same stories told on http://www.419eater.com/ but with more detail.

Most people would have left it alone at that point, but...I'm a jerk. So I wrote back.

I hate to sound like a nag, but that's really not a good idea. They have your name, your email address - and if they ever manage to hack your account, probably a lot more. If you want to play the scambaiting game, check the details on the 419eater forum and follow them to the letter. That includes getting a separate email address, only using it for scambaiting, making sure none of your real details are included, etc.

Most people would have left it alone at that point, but...I'm a jerk. So I wrote back.

I hate to sound like a nag, but that's really not a good idea. They have your name, your email address - and if they ever manage to hack your account, probably a lot more. If you want to play the scambaiting game, check the details on the 419eater forum and follow them to the letter. That includes getting a separate email address, only using it for scambaiting, making sure none of your real details are included, etc.

They had my first name and my recreational hotmail account. If they hacked that account I'd get another (and no, no possibility of getting any details from that account). I don't do a lot of scambaiting, but I DO spend a lot of time online

Back in my relay days, we dealt with lots of people using the internet-based relay system for scams (yet oddly, no one seemed to want to go for confirming that one actually was deaf, hearing-impaired or speech disabled as a way of weeding this stuff out ... 99% of the internet calls were scams or stupid people who thought they were clever by trying to get the relay operators to read nasty perverted stuff). Anyway, we did have criteria we could use to weed out the scams, and if you hit four markers, we could get the call terminated. So she got this email that hit three markers right off the bat.

My coworker also does a sideline business of those 'have a selling party in your home' variety (not the only way to get the merchandise, but primary). She gets an email from someone who has no credit cards and wants to send her a cashier's check for three of the most expensive item that she has in her catalog (that is, three identical items). She kept corresponding with him, I don't know what she ended up doing ... but I did warn her that it smelled like scam and explained how the cashier's check could burn her.

We have procedures for our sales queue if someone comes in using the relay system as some of them are using fraudulent details to sign up services. Some of my co-workers have politely declined callers using that system as the communication works a certain way back and forth between the caller, the operator and the sales person.

Back in my relay days, we dealt with lots of people using the internet-based relay system for scams (yet oddly, no one seemed to want to go for confirming that one actually was deaf, hearing-impaired or speech disabled as a way of weeding this stuff out ... 99% of the internet calls were scams or stupid people who thought they were clever by trying to get the relay operators to read nasty perverted stuff). Anyway, we did have criteria we could use to weed out the scams, and if you hit four markers, we could get the call terminated. So she got this email that hit three markers right off the bat.

My coworker also does a sideline business of those 'have a selling party in your home' variety (not the only way to get the merchandise, but primary). She gets an email from someone who has no credit cards and wants to send her a cashier's check for three of the most expensive item that she has in her catalog (that is, three identical items). She kept corresponding with him, I don't know what she ended up doing ... but I did warn her that it smelled like scam and explained how the cashier's check could burn her.